Applying Ocaam's Razor to the Creation/Evolution Discussion

[Starise]

48 minutes ago, teddyv said:

This sentence "I guess we either believe the Bible or we don't." is what troubles me, because it sets up a false dilemma. Belief in the Bible is insinuated to require a narrow reading of the text.

Thanks for your response. I don't want a narrow reading I want an accurate reading of the text. 

Does not the Bible say God created Adam? ....oh and Eve too. No insinuations intended.

Does direct creation of a humans eliminate other life forms? In my thinking it does.

God used the dust of the earth or a combination of minerals as the materials used. I remember reading that if you removed all moisture from a man and reduced him to his basic composition physically you would have a pile of dirt. Makes sense to me. As a geologist I reckon you see much more than a pile of dirt. 

What's an alternate explanation to that story that works?  Did God experiment with chimps of some variety to get a better recipe? I can't personally buy into that with the available evidence. I nowhere read that God used one life form to create another.

That He makes almost infinite varieties of a theme is something that has always fascinated me. Look at how many types of fish there are. God is creative beyond imagination. At least mine. Not only different types of similar thing but creative differences in the same type. Like my two Yorkies. One is serious as a heart attack. The other is playful and carefree.

 

 

[teddyv]

14 minutes ago, Starise said:

Thanks for your response. I don't want a narrow reading I want an accurate reading of the text. 

Does not the Bible say God created Adam? ....oh and Eve too. No insinuations intended.

Insinuate may not have been the best word choice on my part. I, too, desire an accurate reading. For myself, there is a tension that exists because I have to be wary about mistakenly reading the Bible through a scientific lens, rather than the other way around.

That said, through my experience, the created order around me definitely points to a very old earth, much older than the young earth creationists demand. This is a bit of separate issue from evolution, of course, but both fields of science and their various theories have been developed through the same processes.

My main interpretative frame of the Bible is to recognize it's original audience and what they would have heard and how they would have understood it. The creation story was written in the Bronze Age of the Ancient Near East. The language and imagery is consistent with other cultures and nations of that region. These people had a much different cosmology than we do. I don't see the goal of the creation story as a scientific explanation (as we understand science) but is primarily theological and worldview building - standing against the dominant worldviews of the day. The beauty of that is that even though we understand the mechanics of our world much better (simply due to technological process rather than intelligence), the worldview of early Genesis is still true to this day.

14 minutes ago, Starise said:

Does direct creation of a humans eliminate other life forms? In my thinking it does.

Not necessarily. God can certainly do what he pleases - special creation is an idea that some Christians hold to. We do have to ponder the evidence at hand and genetics is pretty powerful.

14 minutes ago, Starise said:

God used the dust of the earth or a combination of minerals as the materials used. I remember reading that if you removed all moisture from a man and reduced him to his basic composition physically you would have a pile of dirt. Makes sense to me. As a geologist I reckon you see much more than a pile of dirt. 

We are certainly more than a pile of dirt. It is interesting that our key atomic components are among the most common elements in the universe.

14 minutes ago, Starise said:

What's an alternate explanation to that story that works?  Did God experiment with chimps of some variety to get a better recipe? I can't personally buy into that with the available evidence. I nowhere read that God used one life form to create another.

The alternative is that God utilized evolutionary processes to get to where we are. I don't have any good answer on the how and when humans became humans, as we are. I don't think God experimented with anything and I  would not even suggest that (nor any theistic evolutionist for that matter).

I am also not unaware of the deistic trap this could lead to.

14 minutes ago, Starise said:

That He makes almost infinite varieties of a theme is something that has always fascinated me. Look at how many types of fish there are. God is creative beyond imagination. At least mine. Not only different types of similar thing but creative differences in the same type. Like my two Yorkies. One is serious as a heart attack. The other is playful and carefree.

He certainly is. 

[Starise]

3 minutes ago, teddyv said:

Insinuate may not have been the best word choice on my part. I, too, desire an accurate reading. For myself, there is a tension that exists because I have to be wary about mistakenly reading the Bible through a scientific lens, rather than the other way around.

I have run into this as well. Probably not in exactly the same way as you. Certain subjects  when viewed through other lenses leave conundrums for me at times.

One dilemma I imagine you might be faced with is in looking at all of the data you have on ages of rock formations and fossils. I have looked at the science superficially or enough to get a basic grasp on it, mainly the techniques used for dating fossils. I came away with arguments from both sides and nothing conclusive from a scientific perspective. 

Simply because someone from the Institute of Creation Research says a testing method is bogus isn't enough for me to buy into it. I need more than that. What I have found is there seems to be a lot of play in some of it. Not enough play to say the thing measured isn't old and probably older than those who follow a very young earth would have us believe. An object dated at 5 million years old give or take a million years is still well past the age young earthers say it is. So I think both sides play to their respective interests. If everyone were totally honest the young earthers would admit there are indeed examples of older fossils while scientists on the other side could admit their approaches have wider margins of error than they would have you think. It is this concealed lack of total transparency that makes me wary of all of it.

[teddyv]

10 minutes ago, Starise said:

I have run into this as well. Probably not in exactly the same way as you. Certain subjects  when viewed through other lenses leave conundrums for me at times.

I think having that tension is actually important. As a pastor of mine called it, "standing at the crossroads" where the Biblical story intersects with the world's story.

Quote

One dilemma I imagine you might be faced with is in looking at all of the data you have on ages of rock formations and fossils. I have looked at the science superficially or enough to get a basic grasp on it, mainly the techniques used for dating fossils. I came away with arguments from both sides and nothing conclusive from a scientific perspective. 

It's even a bit more fundamental. Geology is really just applied physics and chemistry. What we see in the rocks is a result of those processes, and most of those processes cannot be sped up to account for a short period of history advocated by the YEC organizations, not without leaving tell-tale signs.

Quote

Simply because someone from the Institute of Creation Research says a testing method is bogus isn't enough for me to buy into it. I need more than that. What I have found is there seems to be a lot of play in some of it. Not enough play to say the thing measured isn't old and probably older than those who follow a very young earth would have us believe. An object dated at 5 million years old give or take a million years is still well past the age young earthers say it is. So I think both sides play to their respective interests. If everyone were totally honest the young earthers would admit there are indeed examples of older fossils while scientists on the other side could admit their approaches have wider margins of error than they would have you think. It is this concealed lack of total transparency that makes me wary of all of it.

That is good to approach with a measure of skepticism about anything. I'm more confident of the scientific process because it has a mechanism to self-correct. I think that the YEC organizations have been getting better at that and have shown examples of dismissing/disregarding past suggestions of evidence of a young earth that simply do not hold up.

 

ETA: good conversation!

Edited March 10, 2021 by teddyv

[The Barbarian]

9 hours ago, Starise said:

The real elephant in the room here is we know evolution is used to discredit the biblical accounts of creation.

Darwin said that God created the first living things, so whoever does that doesn't have a very good grasp of evolutionary theory.

9 hours ago, Starise said:

Evolutionists will say evolution really isn't a theory.

Of course it's a theory.   A theory is an idea or group of ideas, repeatedly verified by evidence.   That's evolutionary theory.

9 hours ago, Starise said:

Yet after years of indoctrination from the science community it is still only a THEORY.

In science, "theory" is as good as it gets.   Theories are like laws, only stronger.   You see, a scientific law predicts what we will see under specific circumstances.  A scientific theory predicts and explains what we will see under specific circumstances.  Hence, Kepler's laws described how planets move around the Sun, while Newton's theory of gravitation describes and explains their motion, thereby making applicable to planets, comets,moons, and apples falling from trees.   Notice Newton's Laws of Motion merely describe,but do not explain why force and motion work the way they do.

9 hours ago, Starise said:

The sorts of bones used to make entire apelike men are very suspect in many cases. Someone worked really hard, to take in one case, a single tooth to build an entire type of ape man or "missing link".

No.  A dinosaur expert found a tooth that looked like a primate tooth.   In mammals, teeth are very useful for classifying groups.   But when a mammal specialist looked at it, he found it was the tooth of a peccary, oddly worn to resemble a primate tooth.   No scientist tried to build an entire primate out of it.

9 hours ago, Starise said:

I guess we either believe the Bible or we don't.

The problem is mostly people adding their own ideas to the Bible.  

9 hours ago, Starise said:

That possibly the mother stores additional helpful DNA information gained through a biological learning process to help the offspring, i.e.  this was a warmer environment that I'm used to and my body made adjustments for that however minute.

Mostly, it's a matter of mutation and natural selection.   There are epigentic effects, but they seem to last no more than a generation or so.   Most of the adaptation we see is by genetic change.

 

9 hours ago, Starise said:

My genes "learned" to compensate through a God created process and I might pass that along to my offspring so they can better function in this new environment.

It's called "mutation and natural selection."

 

[BeyondET]

On 2/25/2021 at 1:56 PM, Riverwalker said:

Ocaam's Razor Simplified:  is a principle from philosophy. Suppose there exist two explanations for an occurrence. In this case the one that requires the smallest number of assumptions is usually correct. Another way of saying it is that the more assumptions you have to make, the more unlikely an explanation.

Creation:

God Did it

Origin (Without God):

• All of everything banged to existence for no purpose cause or reason
• Everything arranged itself  in an orderly fashion using gravity, that also appeared for no purpose cause or reason
• Then life erupted spontaneously where there was no life, no organic material anywhere, again for no purpose cause or reason
• The life became more and more advanced finding enough other life to feed on to survive, for no purpose cause or reason
• Finally 200,000 years ago modern man* appeared on the scene, but it took him 195,000 years to learn that if you planted seed it grew, that fire could be controlled and that a branch can be used as a lever and a round wheel as a pulley (Simple Machines) and the Egyptian Civilization was born

 

195,000 years doing nothing? Civilization restarted after the flood 5000 years ago

That is an awful lot of assumptions being based on something that was never observed.

* Man with all the intelligence, curiosity, creativity and drive we have today

Each minute seems a million years, ? 

[appy]

People find science an interesting thing. And it answers a lot of questions. That is all fine and good until it comes to spiritual matters and our relationship to God. The bible supersedes all other writings and opinions.

Evolution pretty much excludes God's Omnipotence, Omniscience, Omnipresence and Sovereignty over all creation.

Scripture teaches us that God has hardwired into our hearts about him, and his sovereignty over all. We know this to be true instinctively. And when we read his written word, whether we are Christians or not, the Holy Spirit confirms in our hearts and minds that we can trust the truthfulness of scripture.

Believing the creation account in scripture requires us to trust God, that he knows what is best for us individually as well as a whole.

Think about this, horses never produce cattle. Dogs never produce cats, birds never produce lizards. They never have and never will. Everything produces after its own kind, just as the bible declares. So why would we think that mankind evolved from apes? When scripture explicitly says that God formed mankind from the Ground. Evolution calls God a liar, when it declares just the opposite of scripture. It attempts to put man and creation in charge, apart from God. Nothing done by man alone is ever destined to remain.

[BeyondET]

 why are their many different races from one man,

why do asian people have small eye openings

[teddyv]

10 hours ago, appy said:

Think about this, horses never produce cattle. Dogs never produce cats, birds never produce lizards. They never have and never will. Everything produces after its own kind, just as the bible declares. So why would we think that mankind evolved from apes? When scripture explicitly says that God formed mankind from the Ground. Evolution calls God a liar, when it declares just the opposite of scripture. It attempts to put man and creation in charge, apart from God. Nothing done by man alone is ever destined to remain.

Your first sentence is a complete strawman of evolutionary theory. Evolutionary theory states that Man and apes descended from a common ancestor. Evolutionary theory will always work from a natural cause because that's what all sciences work from. Scientific investigations are agnostic. Because of that, the supernatural will always be beyond the purview of scientific inquiry. That is it's limitation and why science cannot, and will not, supply all the answers.

[teddyv]

This quote from Augustine has been quoted ad infinitum over the years, but is still worth rereading from time to time.

"Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he holds to as being certain from reason and experience. Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian,  presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking  nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn.  The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside the household of faith think our sacred writers held such opinions, and, to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the writers of our Scripture are criticized and rejected as unlearned men.  If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe those books in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods on facts which they themselves have learned from experience and the light of reason?

Reckless and incompetent expounders of Holy Scripture bring untold trouble and sorrow on their wiser brethren when they are caught in one of their mischievous false opinions and are taken to task by those who are not bound by the authority of our sacred books.  For then, to defend their utterly foolish and obviously untrue statements, they will try to call upon Holy Scripture for proof and even recite from memory many passages which they think support their position, although 'they understand neither what they say nor the things about which they make assertions'."